Looking for help with teaching social skills for children with autism? Need ideas for teaching other important life skills?

Trumpet Behavioral Health offers help with planning skills activities for use by parents, caregivers,  grandparents, teachers and paraprofessionals. Trumpet Behavioral Health is the creator of AutismPro, a web-based solution created for schools to help train educators work with children with autism or other disorders that cause challenging behaviors.

This powerful suite of tools offers training, case management with built in assessments to assist in creating positive behavior support plants, skills plans, and to generate progress reports with graphs.

Now, for the first time, we are offering a sampling of the skills activities that you can use to help you teach these important skills to your child with Autism Spectrum Disorders. AutismPro offers over 5,000 activities in the following eight skills areas:

  1. Social Skills
  2. Emotional Skills
  3. Communication Skills
  4. Receptive Language
  5. Expressive Language
  6. Academics
  7. Independence Skills
  8. Motor Skills

Each week, we will feature a Skills-Building Activity for you to try.

This Week’s Featured Activity: Tells You When He/She Is Tired/Hungry/Thirsty

Objective: Tells you how he/she is feeling
Developmental Area: Communication
Method: Developmental
Category: Social Games
Curriculum Level: Advanced
Setting: Adult-Child
Materials: For this activity, you will want to create a Visual Choice Board with pictures that represent feeling: hungry, thirsty and tired

Activity Procedure

  1. When your child is showing signs of feeling tired, hungry, or thirsty (e.g., rubs eyes, reaching for food) approach him/her with concern and compassion.
  2. Neutrally direct the child to look at you.
  3. Establish a comfortable interaction that will open a line of communication with your child.
  4. Reinforce the child if he/she tells you he/she feels tired, hungry, or thirsty.
  5. Provide your child with the means to deal with those feelings (e.g., get him/her a drink, let the child choose a snack, snuggle on the couch).
  6. If your child does not independently tell you how he/she feels, label some behaviors that will help the child identify how he/she feels.
  7. Pass the tired/hungry/thirsty choice board to your child.
  8. Provide your child with a fill in the blank phrase (e.g., “You feel . . .”).
  9. Repeat the procedure each time your child appears to be feeling tired, hungry, or thirsty.
  10. Encourage your child to build on his/her earlier experience.
  11. Fade out visual prompts as your able.

If this is a skills area that you have been wanting to work on with your child, we hope you will benefit from this activity. Watch for more of these activities each week from Trumpet Behavioral Health. And if you have a request for activities for specific skills you’ve been wanting to work on with your child, please let us know via our suggestions form >> click here

The above recommended activity is not a replacement for behavioral therapy from a qualified Board Certified Behavior Analyst or trained therapist. It is only provided as a recommended activity for you to use in working with your child.
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